London Tech Week – AR & VR World

The Creative Lab (Academy for Digital Entertainment) goes to London VR&AR World.

The Creative Lab is a company within the Academy for Digital Entertainment (ADE), where staff, industry experts and students work together to share knowledge and create experimental concepts regarding the Media and Games industry. Recently The Creative Lab created – together with Cradle and staff & students from IGAD – the Dancer Awakens, an AR film for the Microsoft Hololens. The Creative Lab focusses on new developments and technologies in media and games, and as such, visited the AR&VR World during the London Tech Week from June 12th till June 16th 2017.

London Tech Week – AR&VR World is a conference where major companies such as McDonalds, Ford Motor Company, LandRover Jaguar, Boeing Aerospace and Boeing Aviation, VTime, London Fire Department and HTC Vive present their findings and progress regarding AR and VR. During this week, knowledge, trends and innovation is shared by means of keynotes, Q&A with speakers, panel discussion and live demonstrations.

”The Creative Lab is on the forefront of new opportunities and innovations”

Trends

During this week, one of the trends that presented itself is that VR – and especially AR – is being used in the commercial sector almost solely for prototyping and visualization during the engineering and design processes. Immersive experiences are created to provide a much more meaningful experience for both consumers as well as investors and shareholders. And these same experiences are now used as key parts of design and engineering chains /processes.

Insights

Some companies use AR & VR for the on-boarding process. When new employees are recruited, they are given trainings via VR/AR applications. This reduces the time spent on educating new personnel by almost 30% and raises efficiency. In addition, while many companies (including The Creative Lab) were looking into experimenting with spacial presence and maximizing immersive experiences regarding VR, VTime showed that social presence is the next point of focus according to them. The more real VR experiences get, the higher the level of social presence. For VTime this meant lying in VR became just as hard as in real life. Finally, overall insights showed that it is more about the use of VR and AR content, rather than tech and capability.

”The Creative Lab is on par – and sometimes even ahead – of what the industry is doing”

Next Step

Although there were plenty of insights to uncover, there were no significant new findings. Many keynotes confirmed that The Creative Lab is on the forefront of new opportunities and innovations. The Creative Lab is on par – and sometimes even ahead – of what the industry is doing. The Creative Lab will share this knowledge and information more in-depth with colleagues from both academies, as well as the research department within ADE. Together we will apply these findings in their upcoming experiments, projects and courses. Furthermore; where The Creative Lab is already asking questions regarding applications and theories regarding AR and VR use, we noticed a shift in the commercial sector from tech-oriented desires to these same type of necessary questions. All keynotes shared the same principles – it is not about the tech that you can get, but it is about the solution(s) in process and how tech can play a role in this.